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Viewing Idris Khan, The Seasons Turn at Victoria Miro

In lockdown Idris Khan produced a new body of work exploring the tumult of 2020. Now it’s the subject of an IRL solo show at Victoria Miro London.

The Seasons Turn includes two distinct installations. The largest comprises a suite of 28 watercolour and oil collaged works on paper that are stamped with fragments of the score of Vivaldi’s baroque masterpiece The Four Seasons.

There are seven works illustrating each season. As you move around the gallery, the colours change to reflect subtle seasonal shifts: lush greens and yellows of summer give way to the burnished hues of autumn.

Elsewhere, there is a series of mesmerising blue paintings — a colour the artist describes as having ‘an immediate effect on emotion’ — which are layered with the artist’s thoughts, feelings and responses to 2020. This show advocates for a slower, more considered way of looking. Just what we need.

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Dates
13 April 2021 — 15 May 2021
Location
Victoria Miro

Viewing dear moon by Shota Nakaruma at Peres Projects

This exhibition of new paintings by the Japan-born, Berlin-based artist Shota Nakamura explores dreaming, dream images and our subconscious desires. It also looks at dreamscapes as a bridge between our domestic spaces and the natural world.

Taking centre stage is the sleeping figure, sprawled out across bedroom and forest floors. They are painted in loud colours but embody a stillness that encourages quiet reflection. Time is suspended: Shota cultivates space for our fantasies to evolve.

You’ll also see Shota’s signature motifs: birds, trees and flowers. ‘I try all that I can in order to draw nature,’ he once said. ‘I simply find it beautiful.’

For dear moon, Shota looked to European modernism and found imagery in painting, photography, tapestry, craft and film for inspiration. Of his distinctive creative process, he has said: ‘Sometimes I just pick up the images from a catalogue that I have in my bookshelf and add my interpretation by recreating the work.’

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Dates
12 March 2021 — 13 April 2021
Location
Peres Projects
Eileen Agar’s best known as a surrealist, but she also explored Cubism and Abstraction, finding inspiration in everything from ancient mythologies and sexual pleasure to the natural world — particularly the ocean.

Born in 1899 in Buenos Aires, she was sent to boarding school in England, which remained her principal residence for the rest of her life. She later embraced the anarchic tendencies of Surrealism, befriending André Breton, Man Ray and Picasso, among others. The artist Paul Nash would become her sometime lover.

Over the course of her near 70-year career, Agar experimented with drawing, sculpture, collage and painting, enjoying fluctuating critical, professional and financial success. Eileen Agar: Angel of Anarchy, the largest exhibition of the artist’s work to date, brings together over 100 paintings, collages, photographs, assemblages and archive material, much of which has been rarely exhibited, to celebrate Agar’s unique and spirited style. This resurgence of interest in Agar’s life and art is long overdue.

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Location
Whitechapel Gallery
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